Philosophy of History

The concept of history plays a fundamental role in human thought. It
invokes notions of human agency, change, the role of material
circumstances in human affairs, and the putative meaning of historical
events. It raises the possibility of “learning from
history.” And it suggests the possibility of better
understanding ourselves in the present, by understanding the forces,
choices, and circumstances that brought us to our current situation.
It is therefore unsurprising that philosophers have sometimes turned
their attention to efforts to examine history itself and the nature of
historical knowledge. These reflections can be grouped together into a
body of work called “philosophy of history.” This work is
heterogeneous, comprising analyses and arguments of idealists,
positivists, logicians, theologians, and others, and moving back and
forth over the divides between European and Anglo-American philosophy,
and between hermeneutics and positivism.

Given the plurality of voices within the “philosophy of
history,” it is impossible to give one definition of the field
that suits all these approaches. In fact, it is misleading to imagine
that we refer to a single philosophical tradition when we invoke the
phrase, “philosophy of history,” because the strands of
research characterized here rarely engage in dialogue with each other.
Still, we can usefully think of philosophers' writings about history
as clustering around several large questions, involving metaphysics,
hermeneutics, epistemology, and historicism: (1) What does history
consist of—individual actions, social structures, periods and
regions, civilizations, large causal processes, divine intervention?
(2) Does history as a whole have meaning, structure, or direction,
beyond the individual events and actions that make it up? (3) What is
involved in our knowing, representing, and explaining history? (4) To
what extent is human history constitutive of the human present?

What are the intellectual tasks that define the historian's work? In a
sense, this question is best answered on the basis of a careful
reading of some good historians. But it will be useful to offer
several simple answers to this foundational question as a sort of
conceptual map of the nature of historical knowing.

First, historians are interested in providing conceptualizations and
factual descriptions of events and circumstances in the past. This
effort is an answer to questions like these: “What happened?
What was it like? What were some of the circumstances and happenings
that took place during this period in the past?” Sometimes this
means simply reconstructing a complicated story from scattered
historical sources—for example, in constructing a narrative of
the Spanish Civil War or attempting to sort out the series of events
that culminated in the Detroit race riot / uprising of 1967. But
sometimes it means engaging in substantial conceptual work in order to
arrive at a vocabulary in terms of which to characterize “what
happened.” Concerning the disorders of 1967 in Detroit: was this
a riot or an uprising? How did participants and contemporaries think
about it?

Second, historians often want to answer “why” questions:
“Why did this event occur? What were the conditions and forces
that brought it about?” This body of questions invites the
historian to provide an explanation of the event or pattern he or she
describes: the rise of fascism in Spain, the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire, the great global financial crisis of 2008. And providing an
explanation requires, most basically, an account of the causal
mechanisms, background circumstances, and human choices that brought
the outcome about. We explain an historical outcome when we identify
the social causes, forces, and actions that brought it about, or made
it more likely.

Third, and related to the previous point, historians are sometimes
interested in answering a “how” question: “How did
this outcome come to pass? What were the processes through which the
outcome occurred?” How did the Prussian Army succeed in
defeating the superior French Army in 1870? How did Truman manage to
defeat Dewey in the 1948 US election? Here the pragmatic interest of
the historian's account derives from the antecedent unlikelihood of
the event in question: how was this outcome possible? This too is an
explanation; but it is an answer to a “how possible”
question rather than a “why necessary” question.

Fourth, often historians are interested in piecing together the human
meanings and intentions that underlie a given complex series of
historical actions. They want to help the reader make sense of the
historical events and actions, in terms of the thoughts, motives, and
states of mind of the participants. For example: Why did Napoleon III
carelessly provoke Prussia into war in 1870? Why has the Burmese junta
dictatorship been so intransigent in its treatment of democracy
activist Aung San Suu Kyi? Why did northern cities in the United
States develop such profound patterns of racial segregation after
World War II? Answers to questions like these require interpretation
of actions, meanings, and intentions—of individual actors and of
cultures that characterize whole populations. This aspect of
historical thinking is “hermeneutic,” interpretive, and
ethnographic.

And, of course, the historian faces an even more basic intellectual
task: that of discovering and making sense of the archival information
that exists about a given event or time in the past. Historical data
do not speak for themselves; archives are incomplete, ambiguous,
contradictory, and confusing. The historian needs to interpret
individual pieces of evidence; and he or she needs to be able to
somehow fit the mass of evidence into a coherent and truthful story.
So complex events like the Spanish Civil War present the historian
with an ocean of historical traces in repositories and archives all
over the world; these collections sometimes reflect specific efforts
at concealment by the powerful (for example, Franco's efforts to
conceal all evidence of mass killings of Republicans after the end of
fighting); and the historian's task is to find ways of using this body
of evidence to discern some of the truth about the past.

In short, historians conceptualize, describe, contextualize, explain,
and interpret events and circumstances of the past. They sketch out
ways of representing the complex activities and events of the past;
they explain and interpret significant outcomes; and they base their
findings on evidence in the present that bears upon facts about the
past. Their accounts need to be grounded on the evidence of the
available historical record; and their explanations and
interpretations require that the historian arrive at hypotheses about
social causes and cultural meanings. Historians can turn to the best
available theories in the social and behavioral sciences to arrive at
theories about causal mechanisms and human behavior; so historical
statements depend ultimately upon factual inquiry and theoretical
reasoning. Ultimately, the historian's task is to shed light on the
what, why, and how of the past, based on inferences from the evidence
of the present.

Two preliminary issues are relevant to almost all discussions of
history and the philosophy of history. These are issues having to do
with the constitution of history and the levels at which we choose to
characterize historical events and processes. The first issue concerns
the relationship between actors and causes in history: is history a
sequence of causal relations, or is it the outcome of an interlocking
series of human actions? The second issue concerns the question of
scale of historical processes in space and time: how should historians
seek to reconcile micro-, meso-, and macro-perspectives on history?
Both issues can be illustrated in the history of France. Should we
imagine that twentieth-century France is the end result of a number of
major causes in its past—the collapse of the Roman order in the
territory, the military successes of Charlemagne, the occurrence of
the French Revolution, and defeat in the Franco-Prussian War? Or
should we acknowledge that France at any point in time was the object
of action and contest among individuals, groups, and organizations,
and that the interplay of strategic actors is a more fertile way of
thinking about French history than the idea of a series of causal
events? Scale is equally controversial. Should we think of France as a
single comprehensive region, or as the agglomeration of separate
regions and cultures with their own historical dynamics (Alsace,
Brittany, Burgundy)? Further, is it useful to consider the long
expanse of human activity in the territory of what is now France, or
are historians better advised to focus their attention on shorter
periods of time? The following two sections will briefly consider
these issues.

An important problem for the philosophy of history is how to
conceptualize “history” itself. Is history largely of
interest because of the objective causal relations that exist among
historical events and structures like the absolutist state or the
Roman Empire? Or is history an agglomeration of the actions and mental
frameworks of myriad individuals, high and low?

Historians often pose questions like these: “What were some of
the causes of the fall of Rome?”, “what were the causes of
the rise of fascism?”, or “what were the causes of the
Industrial Revolution?”. But what if the reality of history is
significantly different from what is implied by this approach? What if
the causes of some very large and significant historical events are
themselves small, granular, gradual, and cumulative? What if there is
no satisfyingly simple and high-level answer to the question, why did
Rome fall? What if, instead, the best we can do in some of these cases
is to identify a swarm of independent, small-scale processes and
contingencies that eventually produced the large outcome of
interest?

More radically, it is worth considering whether this way of thinking
about history as a series of causes and effects is even remotely
suited to its subject matter. What if we think that the language of
static causes does not work particularly well in the context of
history? What if we take seriously the idea that history is the result
of the actions and thoughts of vast numbers of actors, so history is a
flow of action and knowledge rather than a sequence of causes and
effects? What if we believe that there is an overwhelming amount of
contingency and path dependency in history? Do these alternative
conceptions of history suggest that we need to ask different questions
about large historical changes?

Here is an alternative way of thinking of history: we might focus on
history as a set of social conditions and processes that constrain and
propel actions, rather than as a discrete set of causes and effects.
We might couch historical explanations in terms of how individual
actors (low and high) acted in the context of these conditions; and we
might interpret the large outcomes as no more than the aggregation of
these countless actors and their actions. Such an approach would help
to inoculate us against the error of reification of historical
structures, periods, or forces, in favor of a more disaggregated
conception of multiple actors and shifting conditions of action.

This orientation brings along with it the importance of analyzing
closely the social and natural environment in which actors frame their
choices. Our account of the flow of human action eventuating in
historical change unavoidably needs to take into account the
institutional and situational environment in which these actions take
place. Part of the topography of a period of historical change is the
ensemble of institutions that exist more or less stably in the period:
property relations, political institutions, family structures,
educational practices, religious and moral values. So historical
explanations need to be sophisticated in their treatment of
institutions and practices. This approach gives a basis for judging
that such-and-so circumstance “caused” a given historical
change; but it also provides an understanding of the way in which this
kind of historical cause is embodied and conveyed—through the
actions and thoughts of individuals in response to given natural and
social circumstances.

Social circumstances can be both inhibiting and enabling; they
constitute the environment within which individuals plan and act. It
is an important circumstance that a given period in time possesses a
fund of scientific and technical knowledge, a set of social
relationships of power, and a level of material productivity. It is
also an important circumstance that knowledge is limited; that
coercion exists; and that resources for action are limited. Within
these opportunities and limitations, individuals, from leaders to
ordinary people, make out their lives and ambitions through
action.

What all of this suggests is an alternative way of thinking about
history that has a different structure from the idea of history as a
stream of causes and effects, structures and events. This approach
might be called “actor-centered history”: we explain an
epoch when we have an account of what people thought and believed;
what they wanted; and what social and environmental conditions framed
their choices. It is a view of history that gives close attention to
states of knowledge, ideology, and agency, as well as institutions,
organizations, and structures, and that gives less priority to the
framework of cause and effect.

Doing history forces us to make choices about the scale of the history
with which we are concerned. Suppose we are interested in Asian
history. Are we concerned with Asia as a continent, or China, or
Shandong Province? Or in historical terms, are we concerned with the
whole of the Chinese Revolution, the base area of Yenan, or the
specific experience of a handful of villages in Shandong during the
1940s? And given the fundamental heterogeneity of social life, the
choice of scale makes a big difference to the findings.

Historians differ fundamentally around the decisions they make about
scale. William Hinton provides what is almost a month-to-month
description of the Chinese Revolution in Fanshen village—a
collection of a few hundred families (Hinton, 1966). The book covers a
few years and the events of a few hundred people. Likewise, Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie offers a deep treatment of the villagers of Montaillou;
once again, a single village and a limited time (Le Roy Ladurie,
1979). William Cronon provides a focused and detailed account of the
development of Chicago as a metropolis for the middle of the United
States (Cronon, 1991). These histories are limited in time and space,
and they can appropriately be called “micro-history.”

At the other end of the scale spectrum, William McNeill provides a
history of the world's diseases (McNeill, 1976); Massimo Livi-Bacci
offers a history of the world's population (Livi-Bacci, 2007); and De
Vries and Goudsblom provide an environmental history of the world (De
Vries and Goudsblom, 2002). In each of these cases, the historian has
chosen a scale that encompasses virtually the whole of the globe, over
millennia of time. These histories can certainly be called
“macro-history.”

Both micro- and macro-histories have important shortcomings.
Micro-history leaves us with the question, “how does this
particular village shed light on anything larger?”. And
macro-history leaves us with the question, “how do these large
assertions about causality really work out in the context of Canada or
Sichuan?”. The first threatens to be so particular as to lose
all interest, whereas the second threatens to be so general as to lose
all empirical relevance to real historical processes.

There is a third choice available to the historian that addresses both
points. This is to choose a scale that encompasses enough time and
space to be genuinely interesting and important, but not so much as to
defy valid analysis. This level of scale might be regional-for
example, G. William Skinner's analysis of the macro-regions of China
(Skinner, 1977). It might be national—for example, a social and
political history of Indonesia. And it might be
supra-national—for example, an economic history of Western
Europe or comparative treatment of Eurasian history. The key point is
that historians in this middle range are free to choose the scale of
analysis that seems to permit the best level of conceptualization of
history, given the evidence that is available and the social processes
that appear to be at work. And this mid-level scale permits the
historian to make substantive judgments about the “reach”
of social processes that are likely to play a causal role in the story
that needs telling. This level of analysis can be referred to as
“meso-history,” and it appears to offer an ideal mix of
specificity and generality.

The topic of history has been treated frequently in modern European
philosophy. A long, largely German, tradition of thought looks at
history as a total and comprehensible process of events, structures,
and processes, for which the philosophy of history can serve as an
interpretive tool. This approach, speculative and meta-historical,
aims to discern large, embracing patterns and directions in the
unfolding of human history, persistent notwithstanding the erratic
back-and-forth of particular historical developments. Modern
philosophers raising this set of questions about the large direction
and meaning of history include Vico, Herder, and Hegel. A somewhat
different line of thought in the continental tradition that has been
very relevant to the philosophy of history is the hermeneutic
tradition of the human sciences. Through their emphasis on the
“hermeneutic circle” through which humans undertake to
understand the meanings created by other humans—in texts,
symbols, and actions—hermeneutic philosophers such as
Schleiermacher (1838), Dilthey (1860–1903), and Ricoeur (2000)
offer philosophical arguments for emphasizing the importance of
narrative interpretation within our understanding of history.

Human beings make history; but what is the fundamental nature of the
human being? Is there one fundamental “human nature,” or
are the most basic features of humanity historically conditioned
(Mandelbaum 1971)? Can the study of history shed light on this
question? When we study different historical epochs, do we learn
something about unchanging human beings—or do we learn about
fundamental differences of motivation, reasoning, desire, and
collectivity? Is humanity a historical product? Giambattista Vico's
New Science (1725) offered an interpretation of history that
turned on the idea of a universal human nature and a universal history
(see Berlin 2000 for commentary). Vico's interpretation of
the history of civilization offers the view that there is an
underlying uniformity in human nature across historical settings that
permits explanation of historical actions and processes. The common
features of human nature give rise to a fixed series of stages of
development of civil society, law, commerce, and government: universal
human beings, faced with recurring civilizational challenges, produce
the same set of responses over time. Two things are worth noting about
this perspective on history: first, that it simplifies the task of
interpreting and explaining history (because we can take it as given
that we can understand the actors of the past based on our own
experiences and nature); and second, it has an intellectual heir in
twentieth-century social science theory in the form of rational choice
theory as a basis for comprehensive social explanation.

Johann Gottfried Herder offers a strikingly different view about human
nature and human ideas and motivations. Herder argues for the
historical contextuality of human nature in his work, Ideas for
the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1791). He offers a
historicized understanding of human nature, advocating the idea that
human nature is itself a historical product and that human beings act
differently in different periods of historical development
(1800–1877, 1791). Herder's views set the stage for the
historicist philosophy of human nature later found in such nineteenth
century figures as Hegel and Nietzsche. His perspective too prefigures
an important current of thought about the social world in the late
twentieth century, the idea of the “social construction”
of human nature and social identities (Anderson 1983; Hacking 1999;
Foucault 1971).

Philosophers have raised questions about the meaning and structure of
the totality of human history. Some philosophers have sought to
discover a large organizing theme, meaning, or direction in human
history. This may take the form of an effort to demonstrate how
history enacts a divine order, or reveals a large pattern (cyclical,
teleological, progressive), or plays out an important theme (for
example, Hegel's conception of history as the unfolding of human
freedom discussed below). The ambition in each case is to demonstrate
that the apparent contingency and arbitrariness of historical events
can be related to a more fundamental underlying purpose or order.

This approach to history may be described as hermeneutic; but it is
focused on interpretation of large historical features rather than the
interpretation of individual meanings and actions. In effect, it
treats the sweep of history as a complicated, tangled text, in which
the interpreter assigns meanings to some elements of the story in
order to fit these elements into the larger themes and motifs of the
story. (Ranke makes this point explicitly (1881).)

A recurring current in this approach to the philosophy of history
falls in the area of theodicy or eschatology: religiously inspired
attempts to find meaning and structure in history by relating the past
and present to some specific, divinely ordained plan. Theologians and
religious thinkers have attempted to find meaning in historical events
as expressions of divine will. One reason for theological interest in
this question is the problem of evil; thus Leibniz's Theodicy
attempts to provide a logical interpretation of history that makes the
tragedies of history compatible with a benevolent God's will (1709).
In the twentieth century, theologians such as Maritain (1957), Rust
(1947), and Dawson (1929) offered systematic efforts to provide
Christian interpretations of history.

Enlightenment thinkers rejected the religious interpretation of
history but brought in their own teleology, the idea of
progress—the idea that humanity is moving in the direction of
better and more perfect civilization, and that this progression can be
witnessed through study of the history of civilization (Condorcet
1795; Montesquieu 1748). Vico's philosophy of history seeks to
identify a foundational series of stages of human civilization.
Different civilizations go through the same stages, because human
nature is constant across history (Pompa 1990). Rousseau (1762a;
1762b) and Kant (1784–5; 1784–6) brought some of these
assumptions about rationality and progress into their political
philosophies, and Adam Smith embodies some of this optimism about the
progressive effects of rationality in his account of the unfolding of
the modern European economic system (1776). This effort to derive a
fixed series of stages as a tool of interpretation of the history of
civilization is repeated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries; it finds expression in Hegel's philosophy (discussed
below), as well as Marx's materialist theory of the development of
economic modes of production (Marx and Engels 1845–49; Marx and
Engels 1848).

The effort to find directionality or stages in history found a new
expression in the early twentieth century, in the hands of several
“meta-historians” who sought to provide a
macro-interpretation that brought order to world history: Spengler
(1934), Toynbee (1934), Wittfogel (1935), and Lattimore (1932). These
authors offered a reading of world history in terms of the rise and
fall of civilizations, races, or cultures. Their writings were not
primarily inspired by philosophical or theological theories, but they
were also not works of primary historical scholarship. Spengler and
Toynbee portrayed human history as a coherent process in which
civilizations pass through specific stages of youth, maturity, and
senescence. Wittfogel and Lattimore interpreted Asian civilizations in
terms of large determining factors. Wittfogel contrasts China's
history with that of Europe by characterizing China's civilization as
one of “hydraulic despotism”, with the attendant
consequence that China's history was cyclical rather than directional.
Lattimore applies the key of geographic and ecological determinism to
the development of Asian civilization (Rowe 2007).

A legitimate criticism of many efforts to offer an interpretation of
the sweep of history is the view that it looks for meaning where none
can exist. Interpretation of individual actions and life histories is
intelligible, because we can ground our attributions of meaning in a
theory of the individual person as possessing and creating meanings.
But there is no super-agent lying behind historical events—for
example, the French Revolution—and so it is a category mistake
to attempt to find the meaning of the features of the event (e.g., the
Terror). The theological approach purports to evade this criticism by
attributing agency to God as the author of history, but the assumption
that there is a divine author of history takes the making of history
out of the hands of humanity.

Efforts to discern large stages in history such as those of Vico,
Spengler, or Toynbee are vulnerable to a different criticism based on
their mono-causal interpretations of the full complexity of human
history. These authors single out one factor that is thought to drive
history: a universal human nature (Vico), or a common set of
civilizational challenges (Spengler, Toynbee). But their hypotheses
need to be evaluated on the basis of concrete historical evidence. And
the evidence concerning the large features of historical change over
the past three millennia offers little support for the idea of one
fixed process of civilizational development. Instead, human history,
at virtually every scale, appears to embody a large degree of
contingency and multiple pathways of development. This is not to say
that there are no credible “large historical”
interpretations available for human history and society. For example,
Michael Mann's sociology of early agrarian civilizations (1986), De
Vries and Goudsblom's efforts at global environmental history (2002),
and Jared Diamond's treatment of disease and warfare (1997) offer
examples of scholars who attempt to explain some large features of
human history on the basis of a few common human circumstances: the
efforts of states to collect revenues, the need of human communities
to exploit resources, or the global transmission of disease. The
challenge for macro-history is to preserve the discipline of empirical
evaluation for the large hypotheses that are put forward.

Hegel's philosophy of history is perhaps the most fully developed
philosophical theory of history that attempts to discover meaning or
direction in history (1824a, 1824b, 1857). Hegel regards history as an
intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the
realization of human freedom. “The question at issue is
therefore the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the spirit sets
itself in the world” (1857: 63). Hegel incorporates a deeper
historicism into his philosophical theories than his predecessors or
successors. He regards the relationship between
“objective” history and the subjective development of the
individual consciousness (“spirit”) as an intimate one;
this is a central thesis in his Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807). And he views it to be a central task for philosophy to
comprehend its place in the unfolding of history. “History is
the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own
concept” (1857: 62). Hegel constructs world history into a
narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of the
polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual
freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the
modern state. He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of India
and China into his understanding of world history, though he regards
those civilizations as static and therefore pre-historical (O'Brien
1975). He constructs specific moments as
“world-historical” events that were in the process of
bringing about the final, full stage of history and human freedom. For
example, Napoleon's conquest of much of Europe is portrayed as a
world-historical event doing history's work by establishing the terms
of the rational bureaucratic state. Hegel finds reason in history; but
it is a latent reason, and one that can only be comprehended when the
fullness of history's work is finished: “When philosophy paints
its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. … The owl
of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”
((Hegel 1821: 13). (See O'Brien (1975), Taylor (1975), and
Kojève (1969) for treatments of Hegel's philosophy of
history.)

It is worth observing that Hegel's philosophy of history is not the
indefensible exercise of speculative philosophical reasoning that
analytic philosophers sometimes paint it. His philosophical approach
is not based solely on foundational apriori reasoning, and many of his
interpretations of concrete historical developments are quite
insightful. Instead he proposes an “immanent” encounter
between philosophical reason and the historical given. His
prescription is that the philosopher should seek to discover the
rational within the real—not to impose the rational upon the
real. “To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy,
because what is, is reason” (1821: 11). His approach is neither
purely philosophical nor purely empirical; instead, he undertakes to
discover within the best historical knowledge of his time, an
underlying rational principle that can be philosophically articulated
(Avineri 1972).

Another important strand of continental philosophy of history proposes
to apply hermeneutics to problems of historical interpretation. This
approach focuses on the meaning of the actions and intentions of
historical individuals rather than historical wholes. This tradition
derives from the tradition of scholarly Biblical interpretation.
Hermeneutic scholars emphasized the linguistic and symbolic core of
human interactions and maintained that the techniques that had been
developed for the purpose of interpreting texts could also be employed
to interpret symbolic human actions and products. Wilhelm Dilthey
maintained that the human sciences were inherently distinct from the
natural sciences in that the former depend on the understanding of
meaningful human actions, while the latter depend on causal
explanation of non-intensional events (1883, 1860-1903, 1910). Human
life is structured and carried out through meaningful action and
symbolic expressions. Dilthey maintains that the intellectual tools of
hermeneutics—the interpretation of meaningful texts—are
suited to the interpretation of human action and history. The method
of verstehen (understanding) makes a methodology of this
approach; it invites the thinker to engage in an active construction
of the meanings and intentions of the actors from their point of view
(Outhwaite 1975). This line of interpretation of human history found
expression in the twentieth-century philosophical writings of
Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault. This tradition approaches
the philosophy of history from the perspective of meaning and
language. It argues that historical knowledge depends upon
interpretation of meaningful human actions and practices. Historians
should probe historical events and actions in order to discover the
interconnections of meaning and symbolic interaction that human
actions have created (Sherratt 2006).

The hermeneutic tradition took an important new turn in the
mid-twentieth century, as philosophers attempted to make sense of
modern historical developments including war, ethnic and national
hatred, and holocaust. Narratives of progress were no longer
compelling, following the terrible events of the first half of the
twentieth century. The focus of this approach might be labeled
“history as remembrance.” Contributors to this strand of
thought emerged from twentieth-century European philosophy, including
existentialism and Marxism, and were influenced by the search for
meaning in the Holocaust. Paul Ricoeur draws out the parallels between
personal memory, cultural memory, and history (2000). Dominick LaCapra
brings the tools of interpretation theory and critical theory to bear
on his treatment of the representation of the trauma of the Holocaust
(1994, 1998). Others emphasize the role that folk histories play in
the construction and interpretation of “our” past. This is
a theme that has been taken up by contemporary historians, for
example, by Michael Kammen in his treatment of public remembrance of
the American Civil War (1991). Memory and the representation of the
past play a key role in the formation of racial and national
identities; numerous twentieth-century philosophers have noted the
degree of subjectivity and construction that are inherent in the
national memories represented in a group's telling of its history.

Although not himself falling within the continental lineage, R. G.
Collingwood's philosophy of history falls within the general framework
of hermeneutic philosophy of history (1946). Collingwood focuses on
the question of how to specify the content of history. He argues that
history is constituted by human actions. Actions are the result of
intentional deliberation and choice; so historians are able to explain
historical processes “from within” as a reconstruction of
the thought processes of the agents who bring them about. He presents
the idea of re-enactment as a solution to the problem of knowledge of
the past from the point of view of the present. The past is accessible
to historians in the present, because it is open to them to re-enact
important historical moments through imaginative reconstruction of the
actors' states of mind and intentions. He describes this activity of
re-enactment in the context of the historical problem of understanding
Plato's meanings as a philosopher or Caesar's intentions as a ruler:

This re-enactment is only accomplished, in the case of Plato and
Caesar respectively, so far as the historian brings to bear on the
problem all the powers of his own mind and all his knowledge of
philosophy and politics. It is not a passive surrender to the spell of
another's mind; it is a labour of active and therefore critical
thinking. (Collingwood 1946: 215)

The post-war German historian Reinhart Koselleck made important
contributions to the philosophy of history that are largely
independent from the other sources of Continental philosophy of
history mentioned here. (Koselleck’s contributions are ably
discussed in Olsen 2012.) Koselleck contributed to a “conceptual
and critical theory of history” (2002, 2004). His major
compendium, with Brunner and Conze, of the history of concepts of
history in the German-speaking world is one of the major expressions
of this work (Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck 1972-97). Koselleck
believes there are three key tasks for the metahistorian or
philosopher: to identify the concepts that are either possible or
necessary in characterizing history; to locate those concepts within
the context of the social and political discourses and conflicts of
the time period; and to critically evaluate various of these concepts
for their usefulness in historical analysis.

Key examples that Koselleck develops include “space of
experience” and “horizon of expectation'’. Examples
of metahistorical categories in Koselleck’s account include
“capacity to die and capacity to kill,” “friend and
foe,” “inside and outside,” and “master and
servant”. Koselleck represents these conceptual oppositions as
representing conditions of possibility of any representation of
history (Bouton 2016 : 178).

A large part of Koselleck’s work thus involves identifying and
describing various kinds of historical concepts. In order to represent
history it is necessary to make use of a vocabulary that distinguishes
the things we need to talk about; and historical concepts permit these
identifications. This in turn requires both conceptual and historical
treatment: how the concepts are understood, and how they have changed
over time. Christophe Bouton encapsulates Koselleck’s approach
in these terms: “[It is an] inquiry into the historical
categories that are used in, or presupposed by, the experience of
history at its different levels, as events, traces, and
narratives” (Bouton 2016 : 164). Further, Bouton argues that
Koselleck also brings a critical perspective to the concepts that he
discusses: he asks the question of validity (Bouton 2016). To what
extent do these particular concepts work well to characterize
history?

What this amounts to is the idea that history is the result of
conceptualization of the past on the part of the people who tell
it—professional historians, politicians, partisans, and ordinary
citizens. (It is interesting to note that Koselleck’s research
in the final years of his career focused on the meaning of public
monuments, especially war memorials.) It is therefore an important,
even crucial, task to investigate the historical concepts that have
been used to characterize the past. A key concept that was of interest
to Koselleck was the idea of “modernity”. This approach
might seem to fall within the larger field of intellectual history;
but Koselleck and other exponents believe that the historical concepts
in use actually play a role as well in the concrete historical
developments that occur within a period.

It is worth noticing that history comes into Koselleck’s notion
of Begriffsgeschichte in two ways. Koselleck is concerned to
uncover the logic and semantics of the concepts that have been used to
describe historical events and processes; and he is interested in the
historical evolution of some of those concepts over time. (In this
latter interest his definition of the question parallels that of the
so-called Cambridge School of Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and J. G. A.
Pocock.) Numerous observers emphasize the importance of political
conflict in Koselleck’s account of historical concepts: concepts
are used by partisans to define the field of battle over values and
loyalties (Pankakoski 2010). More generally, Koselleck’s aim is
to excavate the layers of meaning that have been associated with key
historical concepts in different historical periods. (Whatmore and
Young 2015 provide extensive and useful accounts of each of the
positions mentioned here.)

Conceptual history may appear to have a Kantian background—an
exploration of the “categories” of thought on the basis of
which alone history is intelligible. But this appears not to be
Koselleck’s intention, and his approach is not apriori. Rather,
he looks at historical concepts on a spectrum of abstraction, from
relatively close to events (the French Revolution) to more abstract
(revolutionary change). Moreover, he makes rigorous attempts to
discover the meanings and uses of these concepts in their historical
contexts.

Koselleck’s work defines a separate space within the field of
the philosophy of history. It has to do with meanings in history, but
it is neither teleological nor hermeneutic. It takes seriously the
obligation of the historian excavate the historical facts with
scrupulous rigor, but it is not empiricist or reductionist. It
emphasizes the dependence of “history” on the conceptual
resources of those who live history and those who tell history, but it
is not post-modernist or relativist. Koselleck provides an innovative
and constructive way of formulating the problem of historical
knowledge.

The traditions of empiricism and Anglo-American philosophy have also
devoted occasional attention to history. Philosophers in this
tradition have avoided the questions of speculative philosophy of
history and have instead raised questions about the logic and
epistemology of historical knowledge. Here the guiding question is,
“What are the logical and epistemological characteristics of
historical knowledge and historical explanation?”

David Hume's empiricism cast a dominant key for almost all subsequent
Anglo-American philosophy, and this influence extends to the
interpretation of human behavior and the human sciences. Hume wrote a
widely read history of England (1754–1762). His interpretation
of history was based on the assumption of ordinary actions, motives,
and causes, with no sympathy for theological interpretations of the
past. His philosophical view of history was premised on the idea that
explanations of the past can be based on the assumption of a fixed
human nature.

Anglo-American interest in the philosophy of history was renewed at
mid-twentieth century with the emergence of “analytical
philosophy of history.” Representative contributors include Dray
(1957, 1964, 1966), Danto (1965), and Gardiner (1952, 1974). This
approach involves the application of the methods and tools of analytic
philosophy to the special problems that arise in the pursuit of
historical explanations and historical knowledge (Gardiner 1952). Here
the interest is in the characteristics of historical knowledge: how we
know facts about the past, what constitutes a good historical
explanation, whether explanations in history require general laws, and
whether historical knowledge is underdetermined by available
historical evidence. Analytic philosophers emphasized the empirical
and scientific status of historical knowledge, and attempted to
understand this claim along the lines of the scientific standing of
the natural sciences (Nagel 1961).

Philosophers in the analytic tradition are deeply skeptical about the
power of non-empirical reason to arrive at substantive conclusions
about the structure of the world—including human history.
Philosophical reasoning by itself cannot be a source of substantive
knowledge about the natural world, or about the sequence of events,
actions, states, classes, empires, plagues, and conquests that we call
“history.” Rather, substantive knowledge about the world
can only derive from empirical investigation and logical analysis of
the consequences of these findings. So analytic philosophers of
history have had little interest in the large questions about the
meaning and structure of history considered above. The practitioners
of speculative philosophy of history, on the other hand, are convinced
of the power of philosophical thought to reason through to a
foundational understanding of history, and would be impatient with a
call for a purely empirical and conceptual approach to the
subject.

W. H. Walsh’s Philosophy of History (Walsh 1960 [1951]),
first published in 1951 and revised in 1960, is an open-minded and
well grounded effort to provide an in-depth presentation of the field
that crosses the separation between continental and analytical
philosophy. The book attempts to treat both major questions driving
much of the philosophy of history: the nature of historical knowledge
and the possibility of gaining “metaphysical” knowledge
about history. An Oxford philosopher trained in modern philosophy,
Walsh was strongly influenced by Collingwood and was well aware of the
European idealist tradition of philosophical thinking about history,
including Rickert, Dilthey, and Croce, and he treats this tradition in
a serious way. He draws the distinction between these traditions along
the lines of “critical” and “speculative”
philosophy of history. Walsh’s goal for the book is ambitious;
he hopes to propose a framework within which the main questions about
history can be addressed, including both major traditions. He advances
the view that the historian is presented with a number of events,
actions, and developments during a period. How do they hang together?
The process of cognition through which the historian makes sense of a
set of separate historical events Walsh refers to as
“colligation” — “to locate a historical event
in a larger historical process in terms of which it makes sense”
(23).

Walsh fundamentally accepts Collingwood's most basic premise: that
history concerns conscious human action. Collingwood's slogan was that
“history is the science of the mind,” and Walsh appears to
accept much of this perspective. So the key intellectual task for the
historian, on this approach, is to reconstruct the reasons or motives
that actors had at various points in history (and perhaps the
conditions that led them to have these reasons and motives). This
means that the tools of interpretation of meanings and reasons are
crucial for the historian—much as the hermeneutic philosophers
in the German tradition had argued.

Walsh suggests that the philosophical content of the philosophy of
history falls naturally into two different sorts of inquiry, parallel
to the distinction between philosophy of nature and philosophy of
science. The first has to do with metaphysical questions about the
reality of history as a whole; the latter has to do with the epistemic
issues that arise in the pursuit and formulation of knowledge of
history. He refers to these approaches as “speculative”
and “critical” aspects of the philosophy of history. And
he attempts to formulate a view of what the key questions are for each
approach. Speculative philosophy of history asks about the meaning and
purpose of the historical process. Critical philosophy of history is
what we now refer to as “analytic” philosophy; it is the
equivalent for history of what the philosophy of science is for
nature.

The philosopher of science Carl Hempel stimulated analytic
philosophers' interest in historical knowledge in his essay,
“The Function of General Laws in History” (1942). Hempel's
general theory of scientific explanation held that all scientific
explanations require subsumption under general laws. Hempel considered
historical explanation as an apparent exception to the covering-law
model and attempted to show the suitability of the covering-law model
even to this special case. He argued that valid historical
explanations too must invoke general laws. The covering-law approach
to historical explanation was supported by other analytical
philosophers of science, including Ernest Nagel (1961). Hempel's essay
provoked a prolonged controversy between supporters who cited
generalizations about human behavior as the relevant general laws, and
critics who argued that historical explanations are more akin to
explanations of individual behavior, based on interpretation that
makes the outcome comprehensible. Especially important discussions
were offered by William Dray (1957), Michael Scriven (1962), and Alan
Donagan (1966). Donagan and others pointed out the difficulty that
many social explanations depend on probabilistic regularities rather
than universal laws. Others, including Scriven, pointed out the
pragmatic features of explanation, suggesting that arguments that fall
far short of deductive validity are nonetheless sufficient to
“explain” a given historical event in a given context of
belief. The most fundamental objections, however, are these: first,
that there are virtually no good examples of universal laws in
history, whether of human behavior or of historical event succession
(Donagan 1966: 143–45); and second, that there are other
compelling schemata through which we can understand historical actions
and outcomes that do not involve subsumption under general laws
(Elster 1989). These include the processes of reasoning through which
we understand individual actions—analogous to the methods of
verstehen and the interpretation of rational behavior
mentioned above (Dray 1966: 131–37); and the processes through
which we can trace out chains of causation and specific causal
mechanisms without invoking universal laws.

A careful re-reading of these debates over the covering-law model in
history suggests that the debate took place largely because of the
erroneous assumption of the unity of science and the postulation of
the regulative logical similarity of all areas of scientific reasoning
to a few clear examples of explanation in a few natural sciences. This
approach was a deeply impoverished one, and handicapped from the start
in its ability to pose genuinely important questions about the nature
of history and historical knowledge. Explanation of human actions and
outcomes should not be understood along the lines of an explanation of
why radiators burst when the temperature falls below zero degrees
centigrade. As Donagan concludes, “It is harmful to overlook the
fundamental identity of the social sciences with history, and to
mutilate research into human affairs by remodeling the social sciences
into deformed likenesses of physics” (1966: 157). The insistence
on naturalistic models for social and historical research leads easily
to a presumption in favor of the covering-law model of explanation,
but this presumption is misleading.

Another issue that provoked significant attention among analytic
philosophers of history is the issue of “objectivity.” Is
it possible for historical knowledge to objectively represent the
past? Or are forms of bias, omission, selection, and interpretation
such as to make all historical representations dependent on the
perspective of the individual historian? Does the fact that human
actions are value-laden make it impossible for the historian to
provide a non-value-laden account of those actions?

This topic divides into several different problems, as noted by John
Passmore (1966: 76). The most studied of these within the analytic
tradition is that of the value-ladenness of social action. Second is
the possibility that the historian's interpretations are themselves
value-laden—raising the question of the capacity for objectivity
or neutrality of the historian herself. Does the intellectual have the
ability to investigate the world without regard to the biases that are
built into her political or ethical beliefs, her ideology, or her
commitments to a class or a social group? And third is the question of
the objectivity of the historical circumstances themselves. Is there a
fixed historical reality, independent from later representations of
the facts? Or is history intrinsically “constructed,” with
no objective reality independent from the ways in which it is
constructed? Is there a reality corresponding to the phrase,
“the French Revolution,” or is there simply an
accumulation of written versions of the French Revolution?

There are solutions to each of these problems that are highly
consonant with the philosophical assumptions of the analytic
tradition. First, concerning values: There is no fundamental
difficulty in reconciling the idea of a researcher with one set of
religious values, who nonetheless carefully traces out the religious
values of a historical actor possessing radically different values.
This research can be done badly, of course; but there is no inherent
epistemic barrier that makes it impossible for the researcher to
examine the body of statements, behaviors, and contemporary cultural
institutions corresponding to the other, and to come to a justified
representation of the other. One need not share the values or
worldview of a sans-culotte, in order to arrive at a
justified appraisal of those values and worldview. This leads us to a
resolution of the second issue as well—the possibility of
neutrality on the part of the researcher. The set of epistemic values
that we impart to scientists and historians include the value of
intellectual discipline and a willingness to subject their hypotheses
to the test of uncomfortable facts. Once again, review of the history
of science and historical writing makes it apparent that this
intellectual value has effect. There are plentiful examples of
scientists and historians whose conclusions are guided by their
interrogation of the evidence rather than their ideological
presuppositions. Objectivity in pursuit of truth is itself a value,
and one that can be followed.

Finally, on the question of the objectivity of the past: Is there a
basis for saying that events or circumstances in the past have
objective, fixed characteristics that are independent from our
representation of those events? Is there a representation-independent
reality underlying the large historical structures to which historians
commonly refer (the Roman Empire, the Great Wall of China, the
imperial administration of the Qianlong Emperor)? We can work our way
carefully through this issue, by recognizing a distinction between the
objectivity of past events, actions and circumstances, the objectivity
of the contemporary facts that resulted from these past events, and
the objectivity and fixity of large historical entities. The past
occurred in precisely the way that it did—agents acted, droughts
occurred, armies were defeated, new technologies were invented. These
occurrences left traces of varying degrees of information richness;
and these traces give us a rational basis for arriving at beliefs
about the occurrences of the past. So we can offer a non-controversial
interpretation of the “objectivity of the past.” However,
this objectivity of events and occurrences does not extend very far
upward as we consider more abstract historical events: the creation of
the Greek city-state, the invention of Enlightenment rationality, the
Taiping Rebellion. In each of these instances the noun's referent is
an interpretive construction by historical actors and historians, and
one that may be undone by future historians. To refer to the
“Taiping Rebellion” requires an act of synthesis of a
large number of historical facts, along with an interpretive story
that draws these facts together in this way rather than that way. The
underlying facts of behavior, and their historical traces, remain; but
the knitting-together of these facts into a large historical event
does not constitute an objective historical entity. Consider research
in the past twenty years that questions the existence of the
“Industrial Revolution.” In this debate, the same set of
historical facts were first constructed into an abrupt episode of
qualitative change in technology and output in Western Europe; under
the more recent interpretation, these changes were more gradual and
less correctly characterized as a “revolution” (O'Brien
and Keyder 1978). Or consider Arthur Waldron's sustained and detailed
argument to the effect that there was no “Great Wall of
China,” as that structure is usually conceptualized (1990).

A third important set of issues that received attention from analytic
philosophers concerned the role of causal ascriptions in historical
explanations. What is involved in saying that “The American
Civil War was caused by economic conflict between the North and the
South”? Does causal ascription require identifying an underlying
causal regularity—for example, “periods of rapid inflation
cause political instability”? Is causation established by
discovering a set of necessary and sufficient conditions? Can we
identify causal connections among historical events by tracing a
series of causal mechanisms linking one to the next? This topic raises
the related problem of determinism in history: are certain events
inevitable in the circumstances? Was the fall of the Roman Empire
inevitable, given the configuration of military and material
circumstances prior to the crucial events?

Analytic philosophers of history most commonly approached these issues
on the basis of a theory of causation drawn from positivist philosophy
of science. This theory is ultimately grounded in Humean assumptions
about causation: that causation is nothing but constant conjunction.
So analytic philosophers were drawn to the covering-law model of
explanation, because it appeared to provide a basis for asserting
historical causation. As noted above, this approach to causal
explanation is fatally flawed in the social sciences, because
universal causal regularities among social phenomena are unavailable.
So it is necessary either to arrive at other interpretations of
causality or to abandon the language of causality. A second approach
was to define causes in terms of a set of causally relevant conditions
for the occurrence of the event—for example, necessary and/or
sufficient conditions, or a set of conditions that enhance or reduce
the likelihood of the event. This approach found support in
“ordinary language” philosophy and in analysis of the use
of causal language in such contexts as the courtroom (Hart and
Honoré 1959). Counterfactual reasoning is an important element
of discovery of a set of necessary and/or sufficient conditions; to
say that C was necessary for the occurrence of E
requires that we provide evidence that E would not have
occurred if C were not present (Mackie 1965, 1974). And it is
evident that there are causal circumstances in which no single factor
is necessary for the occurrence of the effect; the outcome may be
overdetermined by multiple independent factors.

The convergence of reasons and causes in historical processes is
helpful in this context, because historical causes are frequently the
effect of deliberate human action (Davidson 1963). So specifying the
reason for the action is simultaneously identifying a part of the
cause of the consequences of the action. It is often justifiable to
identify a concrete action as the cause of a particular event (a
circumstance that was sufficient in the existing circumstances to
bring about the outcome), and it is feasible to provide a convincing
interpretation of the reasons that led the actor to carry out the
action.

What analytic philosophers of the 1960s did not come to, but what is
crucial for current understanding of historical causality, is the
feasibility of tracing causal mechanisms through a complex series of
events (causal realism). Historical narratives often take the form of
an account of a series of events, each of which was a causal condition
or trigger for later events. Subsequent research in the philosophy of
the social sciences has provided substantial support for historical
explanations that depend on tracing a series of causal mechanisms
(Hedström and Swedberg 1998).

English-speaking philosophy of history shifted significantly in the
1970s, beginning with the publication of Hayden White's
Metahistory (1973) and Louis Mink's writings of the same
period (1966; Mink et al. 1987). The so-called “linguistic
turn” that marked many areas of philosophy and literature also
influenced the philosophy of history. Whereas analytic philosophy of
history had emphasized scientific analogies for historical knowledge
and advanced the goals of verifiability and generalizability in
historical knowledge, English-speaking philosophers in the 1970s and
1980s were increasingly influenced by hermeneutic philosophy,
post-modernism, and French literary theory (Rorty 1979). These
philosophers emphasized the rhetoric of historical writing, the
non-reducibility of historical narrative to a sequence of
“facts”, and the degree of construction that is involved
in historical representation. Affinities with literature and
anthropology came to eclipse examples from the natural sciences as
guides for representing historical knowledge and historical
understanding. The richness and texture of the historical narrative
came in for greater attention than the attempt to provide causal
explanations of historical outcomes. Frank Ankersmit captured many of
these themes in his treatment of historical narrative (1995; Ankersmit
and Kellner 1995); see also Berkhofer (1995).

This “new” philosophy of history is distinguished from
analytic philosophy of history in several important respects. It
emphasizes historical narrative rather than historical causation. It
is intellectually closer to the hermeneutic tradition than to the
positivism that underlay the analytic philosophy of history of the
1960s. It highlights features of subjectivity and multiple
interpretation over those of objectivity, truth, and correspondence to
the facts. Another important strand in this approach to the philosophy
of history is a clear theoretical preference for the historicist
rather than the universalist position on the status of human
nature—Herder rather than Vico. The prevalent perspective holds
that human consciousness is itself a historical product, and that it
is an important part of the historian's work to piece together the
mentality and assumptions of actors in the past (Pompa 1990).
Significantly, contemporary historians such as Robert Darnton have
turned to the tools of ethnography to permit this sort of discovery
(1984).

Another important strand of thinking within analytic philosophy has
focused attention on historical ontology (Hacking 2002, Little
2010). The topic of historical ontology is important, both for
philosophers and for practicing historians. Ontology has to do with
the question, what kinds of things do we need to postulate in a given
realm? Historical ontology poses this question with regard to the
realities of the past. Should large constructs like
‘revolution’, ‘market society’,
‘fascism’, or ‘Protestant religious identity’
be included in our ontology as real things? Or should we treat these
ideas in a purely nominalistic way, treating them as convenient ways
of aggregating complex patterns of social action and knowledge by
large numbers of social actors in a time and place? Further, how
should we think about the relationship between instances and
categories in the realm of history, for example, the relation between
the French, Chinese, or Russian Revolutions and the general category
of ‘revolution’? Are there social kinds that recur in
history, or is each historical formation unique in important ways?
These are all questions of ontology, and the answers we give to them
will have important consequences for how we conceptualize and explain
the past.

When historians discuss methodological issues in their research they
more commonly refer to “historiography” than to
“philosophy of history.” What is the relation between
these bodies of thought about the writing of history? We should begin
by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most
general sense, the term refers to the study of historians' methods and
practices. Any intellectual or creative practice is guided by a set of
standards and heuristics about how to proceed, and
“experts” evaluate the performances of practitioners based
on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets the standards.
So one task we always have in considering an expert activity is to
attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance.
This is true for theatre and literature, and it is true for writing
history. Historiography is at least in part the effort to do this work
for a particular body of historical writing. (Several handbooks
contain a wealth of recent writings on various aspects of
historiography; Tucker 2009, Bentley 1997, Breisach 2007.)

Historians normally make truth claims, and they ask us to accept those
claims based on the reasoning they present. So a major aspect of the
study of historiography has to do with defining the ideas of
evidence, rigor, and standards of reasoning for historical
inquiry. We presume that historians want to discover empirically
supported truths about the past, and we presume that they want to
offer inferences and interpretations that are somehow regulated by
standards of scientific rationality. (Simon Schama challenges some of
these ideas in Dead Certainties (Schama 1991).) So the
apprentice practitioner seeks to gain knowledge of the practices of
his/her elders in the profession: what counts as a compelling
argument, how to assess a body of archival evidence, how to offer or
criticize an interpretation of complex events that necessarily exceeds
the available evidence. The historiographer has a related task: he/she
would like to be able to codify the main methods and standards of one
historical school or another.

There are other desiderata governing a good historical work, and these
criteria may change from culture to culture and epoch to epoch.
Discerning the historian's goals is crucial to deciding how well he or
she succeeds. So discovering these stylistic and aesthetic standards
that guide the historian's work is itself an important task for
historiography. This means that the student of historiography will
naturally be interested in the conventions of historical writing
and rhetoric that are characteristic of a given period or
school.

A full historiographic “scan” of a given historian might
include questions like these: What methods of discovery does he/she
use? What rhetorical and persuasive goals does he/she pursue? What
models of explanation? What paradigm of presentation? What standards
of style and rhetoric? What interpretive assumptions?

A historical “school” might be defined as a group of
interrelated historians who share a significant number of specific
assumptions about evidence, explanation, and narrative. Historiography
becomes itself historical when we recognize that these frameworks of
assumptions about historical knowledge and reasoning change over time.
On this assumption, the history of historical thinking and writing is
itself an interesting subject. How did historians of various periods
in human history conduct their study and presentation of history?
Under this rubric we find books on the historiography of the ancient
Greeks; Renaissance historiography; or the historiography of German
romanticism. Arnaldo Momigliano's writings on the ancient historians
fall in this category (Momigliano 1990). In a nutshell, Momigliano is
looking at the several traditions of ancient history-writing as a set
of normative practices that can be dissected and understood in their
specificity and their cultural contexts.

A second primary use of the concept of historiography is more
present-oriented and methodological. It involves the study and
analysis of historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and
presentation used by more-or-less contemporary historians. How do
contemporary historians go about their tasks of understanding the
past? Here we can reflect upon the historiographical challenges that
confronted Philip Huang as he investigated the Chinese peasant economy
in the 1920s and 1930s (Huang 1990), or the historiographical issues
raised in Robert Darnton's telling of the Great Cat Massacre (Darnton
1984). Sometimes these issues have to do with the scarcity or bias in
the available bodies of historical records (for example, the fact that
much of what Huang refers to about the village economy of North China
was gathered by the research teams of the occupying Japanese army).
Sometimes they have to do with the difficulty of interpreting
historical sources (for example, the unavoidable necessity Darnton
faced of providing meaningful interpretation of a range of documented
events that appear fundamentally irrational).

An important question that arises in historiography is that of the
status of the notion of “global history.” One important
reason for thinking globally as an historian is the fact that the
history discipline—since the Greeks—has tended to be
Eurocentric in its choice of topics, framing assumptions, and methods.
Economic and political history, for example, often privileges the
industrial revolution in England and the creation of the modern
bureaucratic state in France, Britain, and Germany, as being exemplars
of “modern” development in economics and politics. This
has led to a tendency to look at other countries' development as
non-standard or stunted. So global history is, in part, a framework
within which the historian avoids privileging one regional center as
primary and others as secondary or peripheral. Bin Wong makes this
point very strongly in China Transformed (Wong 1997).

Second is the related fact that when Western historical
thinkers—for example, Hegel, Malthus, Montesquieu—have
turned their attention to Asia, they have often engaged in a high
degree of stereotyping without much factual historical knowledge. The
ideas of Oriental despotism, Asian overpopulation, and Chinese
stagnation have encouraged a cartoonish replacement of the intricate
and diverse processes of development of different parts of Asia by a
single-dimensional and reductive set of simplifying frameworks of
thought. This is one of the points of Edward Said's critique of
orientalism (Said 1978). So doing “global” history means
paying rigorous attention to the specificities of social, political,
and cultural arrangements in other parts of the world besides
Europe.

So a historiography that takes global diversity seriously should be
expected to be more agnostic about patterns of development, and more
open to discovery of surprising patterns, twists, and variations in
the experiences of India, China, Indochina, the Arab world, the
Ottoman Empire, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Variation and complexity are
what we should expect, not stereotyped simplicity. Clifford Geertz's
historical reconstruction of the “theatre state” of Bali
is a case in point—he uncovers a complex system of governance,
symbol, value, and hierarchy that represents a substantially different
structure of politics than the models derived from the emergence of
bureaucratic states in early modern Europe (Geertz 1980). A global
history needs to free itself from Eurocentrism.

This step away from Eurocentrism in outlook should also be accompanied
by a broadening of the geographical range of what is historically
interesting. So a global history ought to be global and trans-national
in its selection of topics—even while recognizing the fact that
all historical research is selective. A globally oriented historian
will recognize that the political systems of classical India are as
interesting and complex as the organization of the Roman Republic.

An important current underlying much work in global history is the
reality of colonialism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
and the equally important reality of anti-colonial struggles and
nation building in the 1960s and 1970s. “The world” was
important in the early-modern capitals of Great Britain, France,
Germany, and Belgium because those nations exerted colonial rule in
various parts of Africa, Asia, and South America. So there was a
specific interest in gaining certain kinds of knowledge about those
societies—in order to better govern them and exploit them. And
post-colonial states had a symmetrical interest in supporting global
historiography in their own universities and knowledge systems, in
order to better understand and better critique the forming relations
of the past.

A final way in which history needs to become global is to incorporate
the perspectives and historical traditions of historians in
non-western countries into the mainstream of discussion of major world
developments. Indian and Chinese historians have their own
intellectual traditions in conducting historical research and
explanation; a global history is one that pays attention to the
insights and arguments of these traditions. So global historiography
has to do with a broadened definition of the arena of historical
change to include Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the
Americas; a recognition of the complexity and sophistication of
institutions and systems in many parts of the world; a recognition of
the trans-national interrelatedness that has existed among continents
for at least four centuries; and a recognition of the complexity and
distinctiveness of different national traditions of historiography

Dominic Sachsenmaier provides a significant recent discussion of some
of these issues (Sachsenmaier 2011). Sachsenmaier devotes much of his
attention to the last point mentioned here, the “multiple global
perspectives” point. He wants to take this idea seriously and
try to discover some of the implications of different national
traditions of academic historiography. He writes, “It will
become quite clear that in European societies the question of
historiographical traditions tended to be answered in ways that were
profoundly different from most academic communities in other parts of
the world” (17).

As should be clear from these remarks, there is a degree of overlap
between historiography and the philosophy of history in the fact that
both are concerned with identifying and evaluating the standards of
reasoning that are used in various historical traditions. That said,
historiography is generally more descriptive and less evaluative than
the philosophy of history. And it is more concerned with the specifics
of research and writing than is the philosophy of history.

There is another current of thinking about the philosophy of history
that deserves more attention from philosophers than it has so far
received. It is the work of philosophically minded historians and
historical social scientists treating familiar but badly understood
historical concepts: causation, historical epoch, social structure,
human agency, mentality, and the like. These writings represent a
middle-level approach to issues having to do with the logic of
historical discourse. This approach puts aside the largest
questions—“Does history have meaning?”, “Can
we have knowledge of the past?”—in favor of questions that
are more intimately associated with the actual reasoning and discourse
of historians as they attempt to categorize and explain the past.

Contributions at this level might be referred to as
“middle-level historical ontology”. This aspect of current
philosophy of history brings the discipline into close relation to the
philosophy of the special sciences (biology, sociology, archaeology).
Philosophically reflective historians ask critical questions about the
concepts and assumptions that are often brought into historical
thinking, and they attempt to provide more adequate explication of
these concepts given their own encounters with the challenges of
historical research and historical explanation. William Sewell
provides an example in his treatment of the concept of a
“historical event” and the associated assumptions that
social scientists make about the temporality of historical events
(2005). Andrew Abbott questions the assumptions that historians make
about the ontological status of “historical things” (for
example, the Chicago school of sociology), arguing that historical
things are inherently malleable and plastic over time (1999). Charles
Tilly challenges a common assumption that causal reasoning depends on
identifying background causal regularities; he argues instead for an
approach to causal reasoning that emphasizes the role of concrete
causal mechanisms (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). E. P. Thompson
offers an analysis of the concept of “class consciousness”
that forces historians to avoid the error of reification when
considering such social constructs as consciousness or political
movements (1966). Simon Schama questions the concept of an objective
historical narrative that serves to capture the true state of affairs
about even fairly simple historical occurrences (1991). Charles Sabel
casts doubt on the idea of fixed patterns of historical development,
arguing that there were alternative pathways available even within the
classic case of economic development in western Europe (Sabel and
Zeitlin 1997). Marshall Sahlins underlines the essential role that the
interpretation of culture should play in our ability to read
history—whether of the Peloponnesian War or the Polynesian War,
and sheds important new light on the question of the “historical
subject” or agent of history (2004). And the literary critic and
advocate of the “new historicism” in literary studies,
Stephen Greenblatt, demonstrates the historical insights that can
result from a close literary reading of some of the primary documents
of history—for example, the journals of Christopher Columbus
(Greenblatt 1991). As these examples illustrate, there is ample room
for productive exchange between philosophers with an interest in the
nature of history and the historians and social scientists who have
reflected deeply on the complexities of the concepts and assumptions
we use in historical analysis.

It may be useful to close with a sketch of a possible framework for an
updated philosophy of history. Any area of philosophy is driven by a
few central puzzles. In the area of the philosophy of history, the
most fundamental questions remain unresolved: (1) What is the nature
of the reality of historical structures and entities (states, empires,
religious movements, social classes)? Can we provide a
conception of historical and social entities that avoids the error of
reification but gives some credible reality to the entities that are
postulated? (2) What is the nature of causal influence among
historical events or structures that underwrites historical
explanations? Historical causation is not analogous to natural
necessity in the domain of physical causation, because there are no
fixed laws that govern historical events. So we need to provide an
account of the nature of the causal powers that historical factors are
postulated to have. (3) What role does the interpretation of the
“lived experience” of past actors play in historical
understanding, and how does the historian arrive at justified
statements about this lived experience? Is it possible to arrive at
justified interpretations of long-dead actors, their mentalities and
their actions? How does this phenomenological reality play into the
account of historical causation? (4) Can we give an estimate of the
overall confidence we can have about statements about the past, about
the features of past institutions, structures, and actors, and about
the explanatory relations among them? Or does all historical knowledge
remain permanently questionable?

A new philosophy of history will shed light on these fundamental
issues. It will engage with the hermeneutic and narrativist currents
that have been important in the continental tradition and have arisen
in recent years in Anglo-American philosophy. It will incorporate the
rigorous epistemic emphasis that is associated with analytic
philosophy of history, but will separate itself from the restrictive
assumptions of positivism. A new philosophy of history will grapple
with issues of social explanation that have been so important for the
current generation of social-science historians and will incorporate
the best current understandings of the philosophy of social science
about social ontology and explanation.

A handful of ontological assumptions can be offered. History consists
of human actions within humanly embodied institutions and structures.
There is no super-human agency in history. There is no super-human
meaning or progress in history; there is only a series of events and
processes driven by concrete causal processes and individual actions.
Following Davidson (1963) and Taylor (1985), there is no inconsistency
between reasons and causes, understanding and explanation. Historical
explanation depends on both causal-structural reasoning and
interpretation of actions and intentions; so it is both causal and
hermeneutic. There are no causal laws or universal generalizations
within human affairs. However, there is such a thing as social
causation, proceeding through the workings of human agency and the
constraints of institutions and structures. A legitimate
historiographical goal is to identify causal mechanisms within
historical processes, and these mechanisms invariably depend on the
actions of historical actors situated within concrete social
relations.

Likewise, a basic epistemology of historical knowledge can be
described. Historical knowledge depends on ordinary procedures of
empirical investigation, and the justification of historical claims
depends on providing convincing demonstration of the empirical
evidence that exists to support or invalidate the claim. There is such
a thing as historical objectivity, in the sense that historians are
capable of engaging in good-faith interrogation of the evidence in
constructing their theories of the past. But this should not be
understood to imply that there is one uniquely true interpretation of
historical processes and events. Rather, there is a perfectly ordinary
sense in which historical interpretations are underdetermined by the
facts, and there are multiple legitimate historical questions to pose
about the same body of evidence. Historical narratives have a
substantial interpretive component, and involve substantial
construction of the past.

Finally, a new philosophy of history will be sensitive to the variety
of forms of presentation of historical knowledge. The discipline of
history consists of many threads, including causal explanation,
material description, and narrative interpretation of human action.
Historical narrative itself has several aspects: a hermeneutic story
that makes sense of a complicated set of actions by different actors,
but also a causal story conveying a set of causal mechanisms that came
together to bring about an outcome. But even more importantly, not all
historical knowledge is expressed in narratives. Rather, there is a
range of cognitive structures through which historical knowledge is
expressed, from detailed measurement of historical standards of
living, to causal arguments about population change, to comparative
historical accounts of similar processes in different historical
settings. A new philosophy of history will take the measure of
synchronous historical writing; historical writing that conveys a
changing set of economic or structural circumstances; writing that
observes the changing characteristics of a set of institutions;
writing that records and analyzes a changing set of beliefs and
attitudes in a population; and many other varieties as well. These are
important features of the structure of historical knowledge, not
simply aspects of the rhetoric of historical writing.

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Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 1748. The spirit of the
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